Mechanical Terra-reforming, human-tech coevolution

Terraforming, terra-reforming

In 2030s, the humans arrived on Mars. Humans were born on land, and they had lungs that could not extract the gas that humans need to continue their chemical life-fire. Not a problem. They brought with them cylinders of compressed life-gas, and life-gas producing creatures. They turned Mars green and covered its surface with life-gas.

In 19th century, metallic horses were born on earth, and they had circular feet that could not trot over most kinds of land. No mountains, no grasslands, no marsh. Only hard flat surface of no more than 10 degrees in slope. Not a problem. Their human companion-species set out and terra-reformed the world for them. Now there are 10e10 of these metallic horses running wild on the hard flat surfaces over earth.

Fermi estimate of time it takes to solve chess

Landauer limit 3e-23 J/bit in our current universe background radiation, with
$$kT\log 2, T = 3K, k = 1\times 10^{-23}J/(K\cdot bit)$$

Searching for game nodes has about 2e10 nodes/s on a GPU with 3e12 bits/s, so that gives about 100 bits/node.

The number of chess nodes needed to evaluate is about 1e43.

So we get an upper bound of 1e45 bits needed to solve chess, assuming we can't prune any nodes.

That requires 3e22 J at the Landauer limit.

Susan Blackmore's Theory of the Self

Susan Blackmore is a scientist who is most famous for studying memes, with the book The Meme Machine (2000). It's a bit outdated at this point though. She's also a skeptic in debunking some pseudoscience.

I'll start with two videos:

Memes and Tremes

Susan Blackmore studies memes: ideas that replicate themselves from brain to brain like a virus. She makes a bold new argument: Humanity has spawned a new kind of meme, the teme, which spreads itself via technology -- and invents ways to keep itself alive

Living Without Free Will

When I say that consciousness is an illusion, I do not mean that consciousness does not exist. I mean that consciousness is not what it appears to be. If it seems to be a continuous stream of rich and detailed experiences, happening one after the other to a conscious person, this is the illusion.

Let's Read: Homo Deus (2015), by Yuval Noah Harari, Part 3

Part 3: Homo Sapiens lose control

Chap 8: The Time Bomb in the Laboratory

Liberal humanism assumes every human has a free, unified self. It's threatened by scientific discoveries that suggest that such a self doesn't exist.

Split brain humans seem to have two selves. The experiencing self and the narrating self has different ideas as to what's good in life. For example in childbirth, the experiencing self suffers horribly, but the narrating self feels like it's a great plot event. 

The self that gets into the books and into the stories is the narrating self; the experiencing self doesn't make stories. If someone says "I did this", it's the narrating self speaking. The idea of a single free self is a myth made by the narrating self, and is full of errors just like all its other stories.

We identify with the inner system that takes the crazy chaos of life and spins out of it seemingly logical and consistent yarns. It doesn’t matter that the plot is full of lies and lacunas, and that it is rewritten again and again, so that today’s story flatly contradicts yesterday’s; the important thing is that we always retain the feeling that we have a single unchanging identity from birth to death (and perhaps even beyond the grave).